


Something Old, Something New

by Leahelisabeth (fortheloveofcamelot)



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Christmas, Christmas baking, Coming Out, Found Family, Homophobia, M/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-13 17:55:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12989394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fortheloveofcamelot/pseuds/Leahelisabeth
Summary: Jack decides to stay alone in the Haus for his last Christmas at Samwell.  Bitty ends up not going to Georgia after all.  A small Christmas together is exactly what they both needed.





	Something Old, Something New

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dira Sudis (dsudis)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dsudis/gifts).



It was turning into a lonely Christmas Eve. Jack had had plenty of those before. He didn’t mind it, really. His parents were off on a cruise. They had never been big on the whole holiday thing anyway. It was a good opportunity for him to spend some time alone and read all the books he’d been interested in but couldn’t take the time out of his busy school/hockey schedule to read. He probably could have gone to stay in the old Montreal house, but this way he could avoid airport crowds and long flights and the post-travel blahs.

He lay back in his bed, head cradled in his hands and eyed the stack of books on his bedside table. As excited as he was to dive in, he didn’t feel quite ready. He wondered idly if the boys had managed to finish all of Bitty’s holiday baking before they left. He didn’t really need the calories but a lonely Christmas didn’t meant he didn’t have the right to be festive all by himself if he wanted.

He heard a clatter from the kitchen and popped upright. He was sure everyone had already left for their respective homes. He couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to rob the Haus, but he grabbed one of his spare hockey sticks and crept downstairs, the late afternoon light meaning he didn’t have to flip on any of the switches and risk alarming whoever it was.

He relaxed when he saw a familiar booty sticking out of one of the lower cupboards. “Bitty?” he asked.

Jack winced as a sharp crack came from the cupboard and Bitty collapsed sitting on the floor.

“Lord, Jack, you scared the living daylights out of me,” Bitty exclaimed.

Jack set the hockey stick against the wall and knelt by Bitty, alarmed when he saw tears in the blond boy’s eyes.

“How hard did you hit your head?” he asked, grabbing Bitty’s face to look into his eyes.

“Not that hard. I’m fine, Jack,” Bitty said softly.

Jack realised belatedly that Bitty’s eyes were rimmed with red as if he’d been crying for hours and not just for the thirty seconds since hitting his head. “I thought you were in Georgia,” he said softly. “We weren’t expecting you until after New Years.”

Bitty’s face crumpled and a few fresh tears leaked down his cheeks. “There was...a change of plans. My parents...thought it was best that I didn’t waste my money flying down.”

Jack’s brow furrowed. He suspected there was more to the story but he didn’t want to push.

Bitty frowned and dashed the tears from his eyes. “I thought I was going to be alone here. You said you were going to Montreal.”

“I decided I’d rather be alone here than there,” Jack admitted. “Mom and Dad are popping in for New Year’s so I’ll still get to see them if I stay here.”

“Oh, Jack, honey, I’m sorry. You wanted peace and quiet and I just barged in here without warning and wrecked everything. No wonder you had your stick out,” Bitty apologized. “I can get a hotel if you want the place to yourself.”

“No, you should stay,” Jack said firmly, surprised by how much he meant it. “I didn’t want a big, chaotic Christmas but that doesn’t mean I want to be alone.”

“I can be quiet,” Bitty said. “You’ll hardly know I’m here, well, if you’re not in the kitchen that is.”

Jack was tempted to go back upstairs to his book and his silence but he could see Bitty, how he was not quite meeting his eyes, and how he seemed seconds away from dissolving into tears. He smiled at Bitty shyly. “Well, actually…” he placed his hand on the back of his neck and flushed a little. “I was about to come downstairs to see if you had left any baking for me, well not for me specifically, but I was hoping there was still some left.”

Bitty pulled himself together and bravely looked Jack in the eye. “Sure, sweetheart, give me a little bit and I’ll have something for you,” he blushed. “I can bring it up to your room if you want.”

“No,” Jack almost shouted. “I mean...I wouldn’t mind being your sous chef again. Maybe my lattice work isn’t so great but…I do want a quiet Christmas...but Christmas for one...well that’s not ideal either...” he trailed off.

“Oh!” Bitty looked at him in shock for a moment before shaking himself quickly and recovering. “Well bless your heart, of course you can bake with me. Christmas baking should never be done alone. I’m going to make this the best Christmas Eve you’ve ever had!” 

Jack noticed a shadow of sadness cross Bitty’s expressive brown eyes but he thought he had imagined it as Bitty grinned brightly and ordered him to the kitchen sink to wash his hands. The gravity of the moment was lost as Bitty pulled up his Christmas baking playlist and turned it all the way up, then he dashed up to his bedroom and came down carrying an opened box. Jack recognized it as a package that had arrived for Bitty last week. He opened it and pulled out a set of old, metal cookie cutters.

Bitty handled them carefully. Jack took them from his hands with just as much care. He turned them over in his hands. They were well made and he could see the age on them, but he could also see the care with which they had been handled. They weren’t just the outline like the cookie cutters he was used to. There were full backs on the shapes with red wooden handles. There was a santa shape, a reindeer, a christmas tree, a five-pointed star, and a gingerbread man. The metal didn’t gleam quite as brightly as they must have in the past but they were beautiful.

“They belonged to my MooMaw,” Bitty said. “I was talking to her two weeks ago about some stuff and well, she wanted to make sure that I knew how much she loved me.”

“These are pre-war,” Jack gasped.

“Probably made in the 30s,” Bitty said proudly. “They’ve been in our family for generations.”

“And we’re going to use them?” Jack asked.

“What else would we do with them?” Bitty replied. “This is what they’re for.”

“But they’re antiques,” Jack protested. “What if we break them?”

“Then we’ll fix them again. It’s not like we’d ever sell them. For me, their value is the cookies we make and the time spent making them,” Bitty picked one up and turned it over in his hands.

Jack thought about protesting further but decided he could see Bitty’s point. “Well, I don’t know about the value of these cookies once my hands have been involved,” he chirped.

“Mr Zimmerman,” Bitty swatted him lightly on the shoulder. “I’ll have you know that my hands are miraculous and they can surely pull this off.”

“Miraculous, eh?” Jack asked. “I guess I’ll have to see it to believe it,” he smiled fondly.

Jack tried hard to keep it light, even allowing himself a wiggle of the hips to Destiny’s Child’s _8 Days of Christmas_ that practically sent Bitty to the floor with laughter. He grabbed ingredients for Bitty and rolled out one half of the cookie dough to save time. He practically held his breath while cutting out the cookies but they were obviously made of strong stuff and they cut beautifully. He dried the dishes that Bitty washed while the cookies were baking and he wondered why this felt so much like Christmas to him when it was certainly nothing like any of the Christmases from his childhood.

The delicious smell in the warm kitchen made it difficult to wait and Jack definitely snatched a few of the fresh cookies off the cooling rack, letting his cheeks bulge out comically as he chewed while Bitty yelled in outrage.

“These cookies have to be COOL before we ice them. Lord, Jack, there’ll be none left by then,” Bitty fake scowled.

Jack stretches and reaches for his phone. “Are you hungry?”

Bitty’s face fell a little bit as he looked at the time. It was already after 7:00. “Oh, Honey, you should have said something sooner. I could cook something but Ransom and Holster ate up the last of the premade stuff so I’d have to start something from scratch.”

“I thought maybe we would go out,” Jack hurried to reassure Bitty. “There is time for that later.”

Bitty bit his lip. “A restaurant for Christmas Eve?” he wondered aloud.

“Or I could get takeout? I’ll go get it,” Jack offered.

Bitty nodded enthusiastically. “Yes! And I can set up here!”

Jack called in a pizza order before he left. He got to the restaurant and they were pretty packed. He was still pretty early and he didn’t really want to hang around with everyone laughing and clinking glasses and making other various forms of noise so instead he walked down the street a ways, looking in the darkened windows of shops. He was drawn to the bright lights spilling out of the little bakery, five doors away from the restaurant. They were still open, and full of customers. A little blond was the only one behind the counter, laughing brightly with a smile and and a hello for everyone. If Jack squinted his eyes, he thought it could be Bitty. This is exactly the kind of place Jack could see him owning someday. This, a place of warmth and light and heavenly smells. There were a few objects for sale in the window and Jack’s eyes widened as something glinted at him. Within a few moments he was in and out with a bag he hadn’t been carrying before.

After that, it wasn’t long before he was walking out of the restaurant with the pizza and on his way back to the Haus and Bitty. He had to stop for a moment when he walked in the door. The kitchen had been transformed. There was a tablecloth and candles and an evergreen centrepiece on the table that Jack could swear had been cut from someone’s yard. It was warm and when Bitty turned and smiled at him, it was all he could see.

He came in and set the pizza down. “Is this a bedsheet?” he asked, picking up the corner of the cloth and rubbing it between his fingers.

“It’s clean, never been used. I just got a new set,” Bitty flushed bright red. “It’s too much, isn’t it. You were probably just going to eat in your room and now I look like an idiot.”

“No, Bittle, it’s great. It feels...cozy,” Jack reassured him. And it was. The candlelight danced and flickered in an intimate circle of pizza, wine, and laughter. They demolished the pizza between them and lingered over another glass or two of wine after dinner. 

It was maybe 10 pm by the time they got back to the cookies. Bitty mixed up a few bowls of coloured icing and Jack did his best to evenly spread it over the cookies but it was much more difficult than Bitty made it look.

Jack looked down at his hands in dismay as he noticed his fingers were now entirely green and sticky. “How do you do this?” He asked as he looked over at Bitty. The other man had taken the cookies Jack had unevenly iced and was delicately piping on the details.

“Hush you. It’ll do you some good to handle something smaller than a hockey stick,” Bitty laughed.

“I’ll handle your...hockey stick,” Jack retorted as he accidentally broke the Christmas tree he was working on.

“Uhhhh…” Bitty stared at Jack until he looked up.

“What?” Jack asked.

“Um...nothing.” Bitty looked away, his ears red.

They finished the rest of the cookies in an easy silence. Bitty worked his usual magic and even Jack’s shitty icing job looked great once Bitty added the details.

They retired to the living room with a plate of cookies. Jack headed to the couch but Bitty recoiled in horror.

“Wait here, honey. And don’t sit on that...thing,” Bitty said, dashing upstairs and returning in pajamas and arms piled high with the blankets off both his and Jack’s beds. Jack laughed and went to grab his own pajamas. They ended up sitting shoulder to shoulder on Jack’s quilt with the fuzziest of Bitty’s blankets wrapped around them both, plate of cookies and two mugs of hot chocolate sitting in front of them, _It’s a Wonderful Life_ playing on the television. The lights from the tiny Christmas tree Bitty had insisted on setting up on the first of December was the only light in the room

When the movie ended, Bitty had crowded in close and was drowsing on his shoulder. 

“Hey, Bittle,” Jack said softly, nudging him a little. “Movie’s over.”

Bitty yawned and grinned up at him sleepily. “What time is it?”

Jack pulled out his phone and flinched at the brightness of the screen. “It’s just past midnight.”

“Oh! It’s Christmas!” Bitty sat up and grinned. “And I get to be the first one to say Merry Christmas to you!”

“Wait one moment,” Jack said before going to the kitchen and grabbing the little plastic bag he had picked up earlier. “Merry Christmas, Bittle.”

“Jack? What? I didn’t get you anything,” Bitty protested.

“Just open it,” Jack teased. 

Bitty pulled out a set of three cookie cutters, shaped like a hockey jersey, a skate, and a set of crossed hockey sticks. 

“Jack,” he whispered.

“I saw them in the window and thought you should have them,” Jack said. 

“Is this because you don’t want me to use my antique ones?” Bitty chirped at him.

“Like I could stop you,” Jack grinned. “No, I...those other ones are a gift from your MooMaw. It’s a legacy from your family. These ones...well...new family, new legacy.”

Jack looked down at Bitty and to his shock and horror, Bitty’s face crumpled and he started to sob into Jack’s shoulder.

“Oh shit, Bits. What’s wrong? What did I say?” Jack’s hands hovered above Bitty’s shoulders for a moment before they settled and drew the younger man into a hug.

Bitty cried for a while before self-consciously pulling back and putting some distance between him and Jack. “I’m sorry,” Bitty sniffled.

“Not a problem. Was it something I said?” Jack asked, debating internally with himself whether or not he should pull Bitty back in.

“Lord, no, Jack. It’s a beautiful gift and I’ll probably make another batch of cookies tomorrow,” Bitty bit his lip. “I...I told them.”

Jack just waited for Bitty to continue.

“My MooMaw found my baking vlog and I have never really kept my sexuality a secret there. She sent me those cookie cutters to tell me that it doesn’t change anything and I’m still part of her family. So I got brave. I was planning to tell my parents in person but I figured they would need a little time to process everything and I didn’t want to take away from valuable baking time once I got there so I phoned them and told them so they would have the time I was travelling to work through it. But then they told me...they told me…” Bitty dissolved into tears again And Jack stopped resisting the urge to hold Bitty and wrapped his arms around him again.

“They told me that it was best if I don’t come home again,” Bitty said in a small voice and Jack’s heart broke.

“Bits…” he murmured. “I’m so sorry.”

Bitty pulled away again and reached out for the cookie cutters. “Thank you for these, Jack. I love them.”

“I mean it about the new family. And not just the hockey family at Samwell. Any time that you would go to your family in Georgia, you’re welcome to come home with me instead,” Jack said earnestly.

“Jack, honey, you can’t promise that,” Bitty said. “Your parents…”

“Would say exactly the same thing,” Jack said firmly.

Bitty reached out and hugged Jack fiercely. “Thank you,” he said before yawning so widely his jaw cracked. “Oh my goodness gracious. Sobbing in your arms is apparently exhausting. I should go to bed.”

“We could stay down here,” Jack said quickly. Bitty raised an eyebrow at him. “I mean, all our blankets are down here and you’re really sleepy. Do you really want to go upstairs and make your bed? Besides, when I was a kid, my favourite thing was to sleep in front of the tree on Christmas Eve.”

Bitty flopped onto his back. “When you’re right, you’re right,” he yawned again.

Jack stood to rearrange the blankets before lying down beside Bitty and huddling close. They didn’t say any more. Jack’s eyes were closing almost against their will but Bitty was having a hard time settling down. He tossed and turned for about ten minutes before Jack had enough and pulled Bitty into his arms. 

“Sleep,” he whispered. Bitty stiffened for a minute before relaxing into Jack’s arms. They both slept the night through.

The next morning, they were woken by bright daylight through the windows. Bitty turned in his arms and his smile outshone the sun. Jack thought he could get used to this.


End file.
